The Child

JM Jarre's music sounded home made, naive, rushed, understated. Quality was on the minimum needed to introduce novelties; reached quality was almost just an excuse for innovation. At that, only substantial novelties were searched, without care for every detail; lesser important details were skipped. The careless sound of JM Jarre’s albums was an outcome of this lack of the strive to perfect to the last detail in the face of a great discovery. A listener would listen to the album as an experiment, delighting with successful ones and ignoring uninteresting ones. Audiences and composers had this untold agreement that shortcomings are not of primary importance; it was more what this music could become, than what it is what it was about. It was necessary to understand the unfinished quality of these albums in order to understand them; to perceive what is done, rather than what isn’t done. For example, Jarre was very aware that Oxygene has a plastic sound and that he is not able to overcome that obstacle. But it was not aimed for Oxygene to sound like that; the achievement was elsewhere.

Therefore we for the first time have business with an epoch which wipes away all the classicism, which doesn't find it's model and norm in the past and which – although it comes on top of so many centuries of continued development – still looks like a new beginning and like childhood. Jose Ortega y Gasset

That is why the crucial musicians of this period couldn’t be masters in classical sense; the crucial musician of this generation had to be a child. And what was immediately perceived about all of these records, was an unmistakable stamp of childhood. A number of pieces were outwardly child-songs, such as Equinoxe 5 from JM Jarre, but all the pieces talked on this same wavelength of childhood. This was simply the outcome of the state in which the world was at the time: of unstable times of change. In order to be an adult, one has to understand the world and rely on the past, which is possible only in normal, stable times. It was impossible to be an adult creator in unstable times of changes, in which knowledges from the past were not anymore sufficient for new aims. New problems could not be mustered by those who rely on the past and feel cozy close to it, but only by those with the flexible, wondering spirit of the child, who learn from the past where they need to, and forget the past where they need to.

And probably, it was only inevitable and destined that music that will make it happen will be fun; while prophetic theories could function only through murky and irrelevant practice, those deep changes actually occurring could only happen in the opposite, funny, more benign form.

But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion cannot? Why must the praing lion still became a child?

The child is innocence and forgetufllness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.

Yes, sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills it’s own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Not long after Oxygene, Jarre staged his first spectacle in open air, 1979 on La Place de La Concorde, Paris. Despite lack of propaganda, it attracted more than million people. It was a miracle that continued. A string of legendary and at times even bigger concerts followed, including historical concerts in China 1982, Houston 1986, Lion 1986, Moscow 1997 and Giza 2000. Jean Michel Jarre will sell tens of millions of records and have audiences, young and old, from all the continents, and fan clubs in every major city in the world. His fans even started a special newspaper trying to write about his activities (named “Conductor of the Masses” and later “Globe Trotter”). In all of that, neither musical institutions neither popular music machinery did nothing directly for this music. It was a “self-propelling wheel”.

While not having such a resounding success on the ground with people, Vangelis reached cinemas, and Oldfield created some links with traditional and classical world. It was all looking like a start of something big. Schoenberg learned from Mozart, Stockhausen from Schoenberg, Jarre from Stockhausen – and so music went to chaos and back.

I have named you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit became a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra